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A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

diegobasch.com

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Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#51

Post by nirvana »

This was a very interesting read. I was working for a vertical search engine in this very same period. I, and the other engineers, also attempted to get our management to recognize what google was doing right. Unfortunately, we were delayed greatly by bad technology choices forced on us by venture capitalists (e.g. "build your search engine on top of Oracle! they say they have full text search, it will save you time!"[1]) and management short-sightedness ("our future is selling audio video search results to ISPs and portals, not being our own portal." -- this despite google not being a portal.) They actually got worried when the search box on our homepage started getting more queries than some of our larger customers.

Now, FWIW, I'm building another search engine. Instead of 20 engineers we have just me. Instead of 4 years, we're going to do it in one. While I have no interest in going up against google (different plans entirely) the radical change in leverage you get with open source and PAAS or IAAS, combined with Google's having taken their eye off the ball and run off to chase Facebook down a blind alley, means that something like DuckDuckGo actually could take real share away... maybe. (%1 of google's volume would be "Real share" right?)

[1] Oracle did have full text search but did not have the performance or per-machine-efficiency we needed, so it cost us a lot, and it was a constant fight to get it to do the kind of queries our relevancy algos required. we had a constant stream of consultants in from oracle HQ, and in the end dumped it and wrote our own db from scratch in about 4 months.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#52

Post by jusben1369 »

wavesplash wrote: post #45

Inktomi killed Inktomi long before Google helped put the nail in the coffin. What the article doesn't say is Inktomi had a dual sided business. One side was in Caching Proxies the other was licensing a search API. Inktomi decided to focus on the caching proxy business and de-emphasized their search product, only to watch the proxy business evaporate as internet bandwidth became cheaper/better. The focus on a shrinkin…

Thanks for that. I too remember Inktomi much more as the "cache kings" with licensed search a secondary focus.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#53

Post by minimax »

gaius wrote: post #43
paulsutter wrote: post #7

Great article. One note: Google's dynamic abstracts were not only very useful, they also improved perceived relevance because they let users see why the pages were selected. When I was at Altavista, we were also blocked from doing dynamic abstracts by cost. Google's main advantages were: - managed by the founders with a total focus on search and measurable results - google's hiring process produced a very strong team…

When Altavista launched, it was an impressive showcase of the DEC Alpha's power. Intel only became usable for serious servers (with the exception of exotic stuff like Sequents), as did Linux, years later. Google had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, when Lintel became a commodity in the datacentre. 5 years earlier, they'd have been on Sun probably.

Initial versions of Google at Stanford ran on a mix of both Linux and Solaris.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#54

Post by nirvana »

diego wrote: post #9
gaius wrote: post #4

Not competing with your customers is a not-invalid reason, tho' there are real-world examples that go either way.

True. In this case, I forgot to mention that not having a world-facing UI deprived us of vital signals that Google used to improved their experience. We had query logs, but we had no idea of what our customers' users were doing within a session, no user history, etc.

We had a world facing UI, and all the insight that produced, and we still weren't able to sway management that there might possibly be a profitable search business.

In the age of napster people were using our service-- and falling in love with it-- finding music on the internet.

Nope, no money there. Better to sell to ISPs in canada and hope they integrate our results with Inktomis.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#55

Post by dm8 »

That was a good read. I remember I used Yahoo for searching the web. Due to relevancy factor I moved to Altavista (but it didn't improve anything until the day I found out about Google and still use Google). I didn't know that Inktomi was powering search at that time. If Yahoo was so dependent on Inktomi or Google for its Search, I wonder why didn't they work on Search by themselves. After all they were information organization tool. Why did they ignore such a huge market. VC's were going crazy for funding search engines and number of search engines companies were either getting funded or going public. Based on these signals and the traffic they had during dot com era, they could have easily built substantially good search engine; yet they ignored it. Can anyone shed light on it?

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#56

Post by dangrossman »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #17
bstar77 wrote: post #12

After I had switched to Google, I never understood why all of the competition just disappeared over night. You would think they would have given it a fight, but that never seemed to happen. At least this article gives a little insight to that. I still wonder what happened to Altavista.

AltaVista tried to jump on the 'portal' bandwagon. I remember at the time how stupid I thought they were, trying to beat Excite and Yahoo at something that was already old hat, a concept that had the Internet had outgrown. Then they screwed up pretty much the same way Inktomi did. AltaVista still exists. It's awful, and it's powered by the Yahoo search engine. Which is pretty much the same thing, I suppose.

Yahoo! bought Overture (which owned AltaVista) way back in 2003. They only replaced the search results with Yahoo!'s a year ago after announcing the site would be shut down. Seemed like they were using it as an occasional test bed in the meantime.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#57

Post by dm8 »

rkudeshi wrote: post #36
kenrikm wrote: post #20

Why I switched to google. A) it was fast, it loaded fast. B) it was not filled with ads and pop ups. Only one of those is still true.

I suspect quality results also played an outsized factor in most people's switching, even if they don't admit it. Easy test: are you using Bing now? (with their new clean results pages)

Its not that Google's page is completely cluttered now. I remember using web portals at that time to search the web and then Google. The difference was day and night. Portals were that bad.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#58

Post by InclinedPlane »

paulsutter wrote: post #7

Great article. One note: Google's dynamic abstracts were not only very useful, they also improved perceived relevance because they let users see why the pages were selected. When I was at Altavista, we were also blocked from doing dynamic abstracts by cost. Google's main advantages were: - managed by the founders with a total focus on search and measurable results - google's hiring process produced a very strong team…

Close. Lots of other companies were also hiring pretty high tier talent as well, and had intense focus. Google's success came down to effectively executing across typically disparate disciplines. You have hard core research level CS eggheads, you have top tier software engineers, and you have state of the art data center operations. In a typical organization these groups have competing interests, they fight amongst themselves and in the end some sort of compromise is reached that allows everyone to grudgingly get along.

At google these three groups worked hand in hand and complemented each other's work. The eggheads came up with page rank, the coders figured out how to make pagerank scale through massive paralellism via sharding and mapreduce, and the data center folks figured out how to make sharding cheap and fast through commodity pc based servers and massive amounts of automation for management. In the end everyone was working at the top of their game to help everyone else. The result was that google was able to deliver better results (pagerank) faster (mapreduce) and cheaper (automated commodity hardware datacenters) than the competition.

There were lots of other fine details that led to google's success, but in the end those core factors are what allowed them to deliver a better search experience to users (better/faster) and to be more competitive in the marketplace (lower cost per search means more profit even with lower per search ad revenue).

No one else in search was pushing on all the right pressure points the way google was, and the rest is history.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#60

Post by wazoox »

rkudeshi wrote: post #36
kenrikm wrote: post #20

Why I switched to google. A) it was fast, it loaded fast. B) it was not filled with ads and pop ups. Only one of those is still true.

I suspect quality results also played an outsized factor in most people's switching, even if they don't admit it. Easy test: are you using Bing now? (with their new clean results pages)

Oh yes. I remember back in early 1998 I was using Copernic to aggregate and filter results from a whole bunch of search engines, because individually their results where so poor and irrelevant. Then I discovered http://google.stanford.edu and never looked back.
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